A little extra on the expansion front
The smaller netbook form factor doesn't leave enough room for an optical drive or much in the way of expansion options. Still, the M912 manages to offer three times the number of USB ports available in a MacBook Air (and one more than you get in Dell's 13.3" XPS M1330).
Gigabyte also throws in a 4-in-1 card reader, which is a feature that numerous high-end subnotebooks lack. Integrated card readers are common among netbooks, of course, but the M912's ExpressCard/34 slot is not. Only a handful of more expensive netbooks offer ExpressCard expansion options for those looking to add auxiliary storage or a mobile broadband card.
The right side of the system houses the requisite audio and display ports. The power switch is on this side, as well, and you actually have to hold it for a little more than a second to turn on the system.
Flipping the M912 over reveals plenty of venting on the underside of the chassis. No doubt thanks to its power-efficient Atom processor, the M912 runs pretty cool; it will at best only gently warm your lap, and even when the cooling fan spins up, the system is still quiet.
Popping off the bottom panel gives us a glimpse at the M912's guts. From here, users can swap out the system's hard drive and single SO-DIMM without voiding the warranty. The warranty itself is a one-year deal, which is similar to what Asus offers on its Eee PCs. However, it's worth noting that some of Asus' premium netbooks, which are actually cheaper than the M912, kick warranty coverage up to two years with a year of accidental damage replacement.
Battery life is particularly important for ultraportables like the M912—if you're going to be tethered to a wall socket most of the time, there isn't much point to having something this small. For its nettablet, Gigabyte serves up a four-cell, 4500 mAh lithium-ion battery. Four cells is a little more than you get in most netbooks, but rather more troubling is the fact that the M912's spec sheet only claims three hours of battery life. Manufacturers tend to overstate the battery life of their mobile systems, and three hours of run time isn't a lot for a four-cell battery powering a lowly Atom processor.
Curious to see just how long the M912's battery would last, I set the screen brightness to 50%, disabled the Bluetooth adapter, and let the system idle rendering the TR front page through my home Wi-Fi network. Just two hours and 17 minutes later, the M912 ran out of gas. I conducted a second battery life test looping the sort of DivX video one might download with BitTorrent, if such things were legal, and that only cut battery life by a minute. What's worse, even dropping the screen brightness to its lowest possible setting, which is barely usable even in complete darkness, only boosted battery life to two and a half hours. We've seen longer run times from Atom-powered netbooks with three-cell batteries, so Gigabyte should have been able to do better.
